While personally, I believe the Sidekick disaster was just a stumbling block in the embracing of cloud computing for many organizations, today’s news that the newly formed alliance of SUN and Oracle was possibly to blame adds a whole new dimension to the issue.

According to some reports the Sidekick service crash involved an Oracle RAC database and Solaris and Linux servers. Currently unlike EMC who were quick to retract the finger pointers, Oracle and Sun declined to respond to the accusations.

To put a picture on the background of this scenario one needs to firstly look at the Oracle RAC database, a single database set up which runs across a cluster of servers for fault tolerance, performance and scalability reasons. If reports are to be believed the outage mainly stemmed from the Sun servers which led to the user data being inaccessible in the Oracle database and its backup. While the data was not deleted, it couldn't be found and hence accessed until the system was rebuilt. In other words the corruption caused by the SUN servers during an update process was passed onto the Oracle RAC which in turn made the data inaccessible.

So while the initial fear that the data outage experienced by T-Mobile's Sidekick phones was the disaster of unrecoverable data loss, current reports that Microsoft, (the owner of the infrastructure service behind Sidekick) is able to recover most of the data acts as a slight sense of relief to all the proponents of the cloud.

In turn though what Microsoft’s claim also does is a place a rather huge dent in what initially started off as a brave and exciting merger between SUN and Oracle.

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Disclaimer

The thoughts, comments, views and opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own and not those of the company I work for. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the company I work for.